Sadie and Lucien arrive in Marseille by train and take a taxi to their hotel. The narrator describes the city as exactly matching her preconceptions: jackhammered streets, exposed wires, graffiti, burned-out cars, and walled villas with armed guards, juxtaposed with a passing motorcade of state dignitaries in Mercedes limousines.

Their elderly female taxi driver, blasting Daft Punk's "Get Lucky," takes a deliberately long route to inflate the fare. Sadie notices the scam but says nothing, judging Lucien too naïve or too charmed by the city's anti-Parisian chaos to catch on. Upon arrival, the driver tries to sell them counterfeit Patek watches from her trunk.

The narrator digresses into a theory that French matrons all share a single faded floral housedress, paralleling an earlier suspicion she held that Orthodox Jewish women in South Williamsburg shared a single wig. She recalls this from her first private-sector job after the Nancy debacle—a tri-state security firm contract surveilling a politician opposing riverfront condo development, with the interview held at a faded steakhouse near the Williamsburg Bridge.

She concludes that such shared garments suppress collective female unrest by forcing the women to appear one at a time. While disclaiming sympathy for window-smashing housewives, she muses that if she ever destroyed something, she would skip the rolling pin and use a sledgehammer, since its weight does the work for you.